Okay, I have to call bullcrap. Bayer Aspirin says its new aspirin is “clinically proven to work twice as fast” as its previous aspirin. Okay, first off, why did they want us to suffer through the torture of headache and muscle pain for longer than we had to in the past? Do they hate us? And second, apparently this new “fast acting” aspirin is being marketed in an attempt to lure in younger buyers, those not wanting relief from a heart attack. So I guess if you’re having a heart attack, you can wait for relief; but if you have a muscle ache: IT HAS TO WORK RIGHT NOW!! Somehow, I feel like their priorities are out of whack, but whatever.
Okay, so young whippersnappers are really impatient. You know, like 40-year-olds. Yes, for you see, their new ads are supposedly aimed at the 40-year-old audience, as opposed to the 60-year-olds they usually get to buy their stuff. This is actually a factoid I gleaned from a rather interesting article about this product that said Bayer was trying to improve “stagnating” aspirin sales. Um, maybe they could produce more crappy music! That’s what works on me to get the headache going. But then they’d be copying the Head On strategy, and that’s cheating. How about this: show young people how bad for their liver it is to take Tylenol and drink alcohol close together. Those college kids do get those hangovers every so often, you know! So tell them that aspirin works better and is safer than Tylenol for hangover headaches (so long as you don’t mind bleeding ulcers, which are for old people anyway). That ought to invigorate the youth market!
But what really gets me is how they claim that their new aspirin is “clinically proven” to work twice as fast as their older, lame aspirin. Um, you can’t really clinically prove anything anyway (You can show suggested relationships of cause and effect, but that’s not actually proof.), so you know they’re lying already. But all pain drugs use this claim in their advertising anyway, so it’s not really Bayer’s fault, and they’re no bigger liars than everyone else. But you can’t really prove it works twice as fast anyway (How do we know it’s not the placebo effect? Did they tell the patients it would work faster? We don’t know what they did, so the claim is a bit dubious.): you can show evidence to suggest it does, though, which is what I would have preferred to hear. But people are so used to being lied to in commercials, they would think something was less effective if it made a lower claim, right? And so they all must keep on exaggerating as long as it is permitted! It’s just the way it works.
I’m surprised they didn’t say: “Aspire to New Bayer Aspirin: Aspiring to be the Best!”
Here’s the accelerated aspirin ad:
And here’s that article I referred to about the Bayer marketing strategy for this new aspirin:
